Monday, September 23, 2013

Making the Victim Pay for the Bullet

In overtly totalitarian countries, families of condemned
state enemies are often required to pay for the bullets used to execute their
loved ones. Two recent federal court rulings indicate that a very similar
custom has taken root in proto-Soviet America.

Without any solid leads, and acting on rumors, the Laguna
Beach PD dispatched a SWAT team a day later to raid the Rowland Heights,
California home of Marilyn
Injeyan, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher. Her son, Vahan, was
described as a “person of interest” – not a
suspect, mind you -- in the stink bomb attack, which through the
dubious miracle of Homeland Security hyperbole had been transformed into a
“domestic terrorism” incident.

The first of the intrepid heroes through the door at
Injeyan’s home was Laguna PD Sergeant Robert Rahaeuser. Fearing that the
5-foot-3, 125-pound female septuagenarian posed a genuine threat to his safety,
the valiant Sgt. Rahaeuser ordered that the terrified and compliant woman be
seized and handcuffed. The officer who carried out that order yanked Injeyan’s
arms behind her back with sufficient force to tear both of her rotator cuffs. The
shock and trauma caused the elderly woman to urinate on herself, and she wasn’t
permitted to clean herself up or change her clothes for nearly a half-hour.
Vahan Injeyan, who was undergoing cancer treatment at the time, wasn’t injured,
nor was he taken into custody.

Neither Injeyan nor her son was ever charged with a crime.
Although the original
“terrorist” attack drove five families to leave their homes
temporarily, and caused substantial property damage, none of the victims
suffered any lasting injury. Marilyn Injeyan, on the other hand, had to undergo
two expensive surgeries to repair her shoulders.

A few months after being assaulted by police in an entirely
unjustified raid, Mrs. Injeyan filed a $290,000 damage claim with the City of
Laguna Beach – an impressively modest amount, given the expenses incurred to
the victim as a result of grotesque police overkill. After that claim was
rejected, Marilyn filed a federal lawsuit. The City responded with a motion for
summary judgment on the basis of the spurious and all-sufficient doctrine of
“qualified immunity.”

On September 11 of this year, US District Judge Beverly
O’Connell validated an act of state terrorism by upholding Laguna Beach’s claim
for immunity. O’Connell accepted the assertion that a SWAT raid targeting a
“person of interest” in a stink bomb attack was a proportionate use of force,
and that the sadistic treatment inflicted on a submissive 71-year-old woman
“was objectively reasonable when judged from the perspective of an officer on
the scene who was executing a search warrant in connection with a crime of
violence.”

A more honest summary of the judge’s finding is this: The
standard of “objective reasonableness” regarding the use of force is defined by
the officer’s capacity for self-preoccupation and his innate cowardice. Since
Robert Rahaeuser is the kind of person who soils himself in terror at the sight
of a tiny, unarmed 71-year-old woman, it is therefore “objectively reasonable”
to order that she be shackled and treated like a threat to that most precious
of all things, “officer safety.”

In fact, according to Judge O’Connell, it’s not necessary
that the actions of police in terrorizing or brutalizing innocent people be
regarded as “reasonable.” Their “cloak of immunity” remains intact even when
they act “maliciously and without probable cause,” she concluded.

Pusillanimity of this kind, although repellent, is commonplace
among police officers. It is tirelessly abetted by the tax-engorged unions that
represent them, and universally indulged by the municipal cliques that hire
them. Judge O’Connell added another layer of vindictive privilege to this
familiar ritual by ordering the elderly, impoverished victim of police abuse to
pay the legal costs incurred by the government whose agent had assaulted her
without legal cause or moral justification.

The claim that police exist to “serve and protect” the
public is among the most perversely durable falsehoods in human history. Police
cannot be held criminally or civilly liable for failing to protect individual
citizens from criminal violence. They also enjoy expansive “qualified immunity”
against civil and criminal claims arising from official conduct that results in
the injury or death of innocent people. Legal precedents extending
back at least six decades recognize that police officers are exempt
from a common law “duty to care” for innocent members of the public, unless some
documented “special relationship” exists between specific officers and
individual citizens.

This perspective is perfectly reasonable once it is
understood that the police aren’t a body of civilian peace officers, but rather
members of a paramilitary occupation force employed by a municipal corporation.
As attorney Joseph Kogel pointed out while
defending a similarly constituted organization in federal court,
people who carry out such a role aren’t liable for their actions because the
duty of care has been “remove[d] … from the battlefield.”

Kogel made that argument before the US District Court for
Eastern Virginia in October, 2008, while defending the military contractor CACI
International in a lawsuit brought by Iraqi torture victims. CACI was employed
by the Pentagon and the CIA to carry out imprisonment and interrogation of
Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

In a
lawsuit filed against CACI, former detainee Suhail Najim Abdullah al
Shimari, who was seized in his home in November 2003, describes how he was held
without charge or justification by CACI for more than four years.

During that
time, he was subjected to electric shocks, endured frequent beatings, deprived
of food and sleep, threatened with dogs, stripped and kept naked in his cell
for extended periods, subjected to extremes of temperatures and sensory
deprivation, and forced to watch as CACI contractors – including a
spectacularly sadistic specimen named Timothy Dugan – abused other prisoners. On
other
occasions, Shimari was forced to stand on sharp stones until his feet bled.

CACI, which made tens of millions of dollars by imprisoning
and torturing innocent Iraqis, has claimed that they enjoy “absolute immunity”
from both criminal and civil liability.

Like the other “public-private partnerships” on which our
modern fascist system has come to depend – beginning with the grand progenitor,
the Federal Reserve – CACI can claim to be either a private corporation or a
government entity, depending on present needs. As a private company, its
operatives can’t be prosecuted for violations of the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. As a subcontractor for the Executive Branch in a war zone they can
claim that they are not subject to the jurisdiction of Article III courts.

During an
October 2008 hearing, Kogel took refuge in tautology, asserting
that “it is appropriate to extend the immunity enjoyed by military
interrogators to [CACI’s] civilian interrogators because to do the contrary
would deprive the government of the ability to delegate functions when it
determines it’s appropriate to do so….[I]f contractors are exposed to tort suits,
they will be either unwilling to perform those functions and that of course
impairs the ability of the government to delegate functions or [the
contractors] will perform them only under conditions that may not be in the
government’s long-term interest.”

Briefly and more lucidly stated, CACI’s argument is that its
employees can’t be held liable for committing the crime of torture, because
this would foreclose the possibility of the government hiring more torturers in
the future.

In June, the US District Court in Eastern Virginia formally
dismissed the lawsuit against CACI. The corporation promptly demanded that its
victims pay $15,580 in legal costs. In a legal
motion that would be breathtakingly cynical had not such cynicism
become commonplace, CACI accused the victims of failing to present their case –
and then observed that “the United States, in its considered judgment,
apparently views three of the Plaintiffs as sufficiently threatening to the
security of the United States that it would not allow them into this country
even long enough to sit for a deposition.”

The Regime used a similar argument in 2007 to prevent Maher
Arar – a Canadian citizen rendered to Syrian custody to be tortured by Bashar
al-Assad’s secret police – from coming to the U.S. to testify. It has used a
variation on that argument to justify the continued imprisonment of innocent
men at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared to leave, but are being detained
because of concerns that they may become
“security risks” on account of the abuse they have endured.

Under the emerging definition of official immunity, a victim
becomes a “security risk” merely by protesting the abuse he or she has suffered
at the hands of the Regime’s operatives. This is true whether the abuse occurred
at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or the local police station.

War games: SSPD officers conduct SWAT drill.

Alicia Garafalo, a resident of Saratoga Springs, New York, attempted
to file a complaint against an off-duty state trooper who allegedly
assaulted her outside a tavern in 2009. Saratoga Springs police asked Garafalo
to appear in court to sign a complaint against Trooper Kenneth Ahigian, whose
brother Justin is part of the city’s police force. After she filed the
complaint, state police rejected her claim – and two Saratoga Springs officers
visited Garafalo’s workplace to issue a criminal citation for second-degree
harassment and second-degree obstruction of governmental administration.

When Fox was done with Contreras, she went back into the
court to complain about her treatment. Fox then ordered that his victim be
arrested for “making false allegations about a law enforcement officer.” That “offense”
isn’t listed in any Nevada statute.

For several minutes, Fox and his gelatinous supervisor,
James Kenyon, used the threat of an illegal arrest and the seizure of Contreras’s
child in an attempt to extort a recantation of her accusation. When she
refused, Kenyon handcuffed the weeping Contreras as her two-year-old daughter
pleaded with him not to take her mother away.

“How could you do this to me?” Contreras pleaded as Doninger
sat stolidly in the judge’s chair, pointedly ignoring the victim. “How could
you watch? How could you watch?”

Contreras was taken to a holding cell where she was forced
to undergo drug tests (which were negative). Her daughter was abducted by Child
Protective Services and held for several hours before being released to the
custody of her father. For several months, Contreras was allowed only to have
limited and supervised visits with the hostage at a CPS-run facility.

The formal charges filed against Contreras by her abuser
were “providing false information to a police officer” and “disturbing the
peace.” They were dismissed in May 2012. By that time, the victim had filed an
internal affairs complaint that led to an investigation that resulted in Fox’s
termination by the Clark County Court System. Weep not for Ronald Fox: He has
filed a legal motion for reinstatement, claiming that his termination violated “mandatory
written procedures.”

The video of the August 2011 atrocity in Doninger’s
courtroom is an amazing artifact, capturing as it does so many aspects of the
compounded cruelty, corruption, and impunity that characterize the regime under
which we live. Of particular note is the determined indifference displayed by
Doninger as she sits with her back turned to the victim, conspicuously ignoring
Contreras while playing with the two-year-old child who is about to be wrested,
by force of arms, from her innocent mother.

Doninger is entirely representative of the robe-wearing
functionaries who blithely issue no-knock SWAT raids now, and will, in all
likelihood, soon be ratifying lethal drone strikes by police agencies. There’s
no reason to believe that people of her ilk would scruple at ordering survivors
of such summary executions to pay the expenses incurred in murdering their
loved ones.

Many thanks to those who have donated to help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Any help you can provide will be very deeply appreciated. Thanks, once again -- and God bless!

If they cannot be prosecuted for their criminal actions then she should sue ALL who were involved at any level in the "private" where they have NO immunity. She should take their "stuff" and their "bonds"!Rodney Dale Class has proved in court that the Police and just about any other so called "public" officials and agencies actually operate in the "private" sector! They have NO public immunity from lawsuit in the "private".Search: NC; Rodney Dale Class; 2012; (fall) "police operate in the private".Mr. Class prosecuted the case himself as a "private attorney general (PAG)" under a provision of the Federal Act of 1866. He won both the initial case and expected appeal allowing the case to be cited in court.Remember:"Andy is responsible for what Barney does"!

Mr. Grigg,Thank you for another fine article. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, which limited the arbitrary powers of the King, was drafted and signed in the year 1215. We the people no longer have the rights, in our persons and property, that our ancestors enjoyed 798 years ago. This is incredible. We have become literally worse off than the medieval serfs. The entire United State (no s) and ALL State institutions are populated by psychopathic predators and bloodsucking leeches. Justice does not exist. Humanity does not exist. We might as well be ruled by The Borg. Their arrogant abuse of their assumed power grows daily. I see no way to reverse this trend except by violent force. Peacefully electing the Crips (Democrats) or the Bloods (Republicans) to rule us will not change our situation. Appealing to these psychopaths for compassion or justice is useless. When the inevitable economic collapse comes, and the people's street protests are met with bullets, will we run and hide like rabbits, or will real men and women be found at that time? Right now the rabbits are everywhere. Or maybe we should call them the mice. They do not even deserve to be called sheep. Thank you, Mr. Grigg, for being a voice crying in the wilderness of apathy, to transform the minds of the lazy and the complacent.